Kyoto; Friday, 11 April, 2025

Although it was an early-afternoon flight (which eventually became a late afternoon flight), I’d stayed overnight at an airport hotel as I was travelling up the front of the plane so wanted to make full use of the lounge at the airport, so after a quick breakfast at the hotel I headed over to Hatton Cross station and picked up the tube down to Terminal 5.

After checking in and dropping off my luggage I headed through the First Wing and on into the Concorde Lounge to enjoy a second significantly nice breakfast, given it was cooked to order, rather than off of the buffet.

I spent several hours in the lounge, including stopping off for a quick lunch, before the gate for our flight was called, marking a step down in the premium feel with the news that it was a bus gate to a remote stand rather than an actual proper air bridge.

I finished off lunch and headed down to the gate, only to find out that boarding was going to be delayed by at least 30 minutes as the plane had only just come back into service following maintenance work and it turned out that a problem with the air-conditioning had been discovered which was making the plane unreasonably hot. I did contemplate heading back to the lounge, but decided instead just to go for a walk around the terminal given I was looking at 14 hours on the plane, so it would probably be best to get some exercise in.

We eventually started boarding a few minutes before we were originally supposed to be departing, so it was clear there was going to be a little bit of a delay, and by the time the final bus arrived at the plane (long after I’d boarded and was already onto my second glass of champagne) we were almost an hour late, but with the passengers all boarded the stairs were removed and then a couple of minutes later reattached and more engineers got on.

It turned out that the paperwork for the air-conditioning fix hadn’t been signed off correctly and at present the plane was considered unfit to fly, so we had to wait for paperwork to be completed before we finally were ready to push back almost exactly 2 hours late.

There was then a long taxi out to the end of the runway, which was almost the complete opposite end of the airfield from where we were parked before we finally took off into the sky and shortly after let the service commence.